Crimson Skies (Epilogue)
By Tkgamer

(Outskirts of Farbanti 2004)

The prison cell was virtually empty…Its walls covered with symbols and carvings made by people who had since long gone, There lives ended by General Farbanti and his terror years ago. Yet a single thing remained defiant to that dark past…there by the cell's broken window was a teenage boy, sitting with his arms around his knees. His long dark hair was flopping around from the wind that came through the broken window. The boy had been slowly starring at the setting Sun when his erring thoughts were interrupted by the flashes and shockwaves that started coming from the horizon…

The entire room started shacking from incoming shells…"I'm so scared…" whispered the boy as a dust started to fall all around him…

Out side the tragedy of war raged on as a desperate platoon of Eursean M60A3s and a depleted company of Eursean Infantry tried hopelessly to stop the advance of an entire battalion of ISAF M1A2's…

The Eursean M60s opened fire first…three seconds later two rising colums of fire confirmed their kills. The remaining ISAF M1s quickly scattered and tried to find cover even as more of there own tanks started to take fire….

"Dammit it's an Ambush! Everyone find some cover!" Shouted the ISAF tank commander as his tank raced to get behind some trees…The tank commander was a veteran of San Salvacion and Whisky Corridor, and like all veterans their experience and training overrides their fear…The ISAf tank commander was no exception. As his tank came to a screeching halt behind the trees the commander was already starring through his scope and barking new orders to his tank crew: "Gunner Switch to IR and find those bastards!"

The Gunners acknowledgment was echoed by the distinct sound of a rotating turret. Five tense seconds passed by during which the commander witnessed another one of his tanks go up in flames… "Got em!" shouted the gunner "I see four of tham at two o'clock!" shouted the gunner.

The Commander turned his scope and spotted the silhouettes of four tanks dug in behind a mound of earth…. "Fire" cried the commander…less than a second later the gunner pressed the trigger and watched as one Eursean tank had its turret blown up 10 meters into the air…

Inside the prison cell the teenage boy was crying and shaking with every explosion and shockwave he heard and felt…On the other side of the cell's walls, the last remaining Eursean M60 was trying to escape to join up with the retreating infantry…It was a futile effort…Watching the entire battle from 2,000 feet was a single ISAF F-22 with the number 001 emblazed in blue under its cockpit…A few seconds later a request for Air Support reached the pilot who then pulled his F-22 into a steep dive…

The boy was shouting constantly now as the cell started shacking more and more from the aproching tank...

Mobius spotted his target…It was moving at 40mph towards the east…he then selected one smart-bomb on his control panel and pulled the trigger…

The boy was now in a frenzy…his face was contorted into an expression of pure terror…The boy slowly heard his screaming getting drowned out by the rumbling of the tank…he kept screaming till…everything turned dark and silent…

The boy's eyes slowly drifted open… "Where am I?" whispered the boy…as he looked around him and realized he wasn't in his cell anymore but in a pill of rubble and burnt wood...He got up and slowly started to take in his surroundings…Half of the prison was gone…his cell was now nothing more than a crater with the wreckage of a tank encastrated in it…He looked up at the tank and spotted what had to be the burnt-out body of a man sticking out of the turret…as soon as he saw that he doubled over and started though up… "Damn!...I couldn't …" the boy was hit with flashbacks as he slowly started to sob… "Mother, Father…I…couldn't save you!...If only I'd had power…If only I'd had power…"

He was brought back into reality by the whine of turbo-jets as two blurs raced after each other in the crimson sky…as the boy's eyes focused on the moving objects he recognized them. It was a Eursean Red Typhoon chasing what had to be an F-22 from ISAF's elite squadron "Mobius". The boy watched as both planes turned and burned, each pilot trying to get on the tail of other. After a few minutes and 20 rounds fired by the ISAF Ace it became painfully clear to the boy that the Pilot of the Typhoon wasn't as good as his oponent…Yet the Red Typhoon stubbornly kept on fighting, at one point its pilot almost managed to down the ISAF plane with two well timed missiles volleys...But the ISAF pilot was too good…Eventually the ISAF pilot managed to get behind the Typhoon and fire a single missile…

"Nooo!", Shouted the boy as the missile got closer and closer to the Typhoon…The missile hit the Typhoon on its left wing… Wounded, the Plane stalled…fell and as it fell in front of the sun exploded in a blaze of fire and light… "Nooo...I couldn't do a thing…" whispered the boy as he watched the wreckage plumate towards the ground…